Connecting genomic regions with circular arcs

Nowadays, scientific and information visualization are key tools to analyze and understand genomic data. Several software solutions exist, with which we are not just able to reconstruct the shape of the genomes, but we can represent their properties and the relationships between the chromosomes in different abstract ways as well. Circos [1] is one of the widely used software that uses the so-called circular layout technique to visualize information. One of the main ideas of Circos is to represent connections between well-defined regions with Bézier curves, by connecting different parts of the circle (see Figure 1). We have realized that the usage of these curves can hide important information in some cases, even if we are able to use different parameters for trying to find the best settings for given data. Our aim in this project is to provide a tool based on a different geometric model, with which we can show this—sometimes hidden—information quickly. In our previously published work [2], we developed a table visualization tool, and we extended it with new features to demonstrate the usefulness of our presented solution.